1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for data storage protection using cryptography.
2. Description of Related Art
Most data processing systems contain sensitive data and sensitive operations that need to be protected. For example, the integrity of configuration information needs to be protected from illegitimate modification, while other information, such as a password file, needs to be protected from illegitimate disclosure. As another example, a data processing system needs to be able to reliably identify itself to other data processing systems.
An operator of a given data processing system may employ many different types of security mechanisms to protect the data processing system. For example, the operating system on the data processing system may provide various software mechanisms to protect sensitive data, such as various authentication and authorization schemes, while certain hardware devices and software applications may rely upon hardware mechanisms to protect sensitive data, such as hardware security tokens and biometric sensor devices.
The integrity of a data processing system's data and its operations, however, centers around the issue of trust. A data processing system's data and operations can be verified or accepted by another entity if that entity has some manner for establishing trust with the data processing system with respect to particular data items or particular operations.
Hence, the ability to protect a data processing system is limited by the manner in which trust is created or rooted within the data processing system. To address the issues of protecting data processing systems, a consortium of companies has formed the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to develop and to promulgate open standards and specifications for trusted computing. According to the specifications of the Trusted Computing Group, trust within a given data processing system or trust between a data processing system and another entity is based on the existence of a hardware component within the data processing system that has been termed the trusted platform module (TPM).
A trusted platform module physically secures and protects certain cryptographic key data. Each trusted platform module is unique at the point of manufacture. If a trusted platform module fails, the cryptographic key material that is protected by the device is rendered unusable.
Current trusted platform architectures focus on low-cost security modules, which are tied to a single system, such as a desktop computer or portable computer. Although these low-cost security modules are not necessarily prone to failure, the failure of a security module within a desktop computer would generally have less costly and less labor-intensive consequences than the failure of a similar security module within a high-performance server, which are often manufactured with redundant capabilities in order to avoid an unacceptable single point of failure.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a mechanism for improving the availability of a trusted platform module. It would be particularly advantageous to allow the use of low-cost trusted platform modules while ensuring system availability.